Intergenerational retrospective viewpoints and individual policy preferences for future: A deliberative experiment for forest management

• Published in: Futures : the journal of policy, planning and futures studies Vol. 105; pp. 40 - 53
• Main Authors: Nakagawa, Yoshinori, Kotani, Koji, Matsumoto, Mika, Saijo, Tatsuyoshi
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Elsevier Ltd 01.01.2019; Elsevier Science Ltd
• Subjects: Brain; Environmental policy; Forest management; Forestry; Future; Future design; Intergenerational retrospective viewpoint; Preferences of policies; Resource management; Sustainable design; Sustainable development; Sustainable forest management; Preferences of policies; Intergenerational retrospective viewpoint; Future design; Sustainable forest management
• ISSN: 0016-3287; 1873-6378
• DOI: 10.1016/j.futures.2018.06.013

•We institute a deliberative experiment to test whether intergenerational retrospective viewpoints affect individual policy preferences.•We prepare case method materials for the two treatments of non-retrospective and retrospective settings.•Subjects reveal preferences for forest policies at the individual and group levels through deliberative experiments.•Subjects in the retrospective treatment tend to choose as favorite policies those that fundamentally change the status quo.•Acquiring intergenerational retrospective viewpoints as part of projecting the future could possibly affect policy preferences. Brain scientists have established that projecting future events can influence the functioning of human brains and possibly current decisions (Schultz et al., 1997; Gilbert and Wilson, 2007; Gerlach et al., 2014, Szpunara et al., 2014). We design and institute a deliberative experiment to test whether the acquisition and experience of intergenerational retrospective viewpoints as one way of projecting future events affect individual preferences for policies. To this end, we employ a case-method approach for forest management policies in Kochi prefecture, Japan, because these environmental issues extend over multiple generations. We prepare two treatments of non-retrospective and retrospective settings where subjects are asked to read through a case-method material on forest management and reveal preferences for policies at the individual and group levels through deliberative discussions. Subjects in the retrospective treatment experience a series of procedures to acquire intergenerational retrospective viewpoints, while those in the non-retrospective treatment do not. The results reveal that the acquisition and experience of intergenerational retrospective viewpoints affect individual preferences for forest policies in that the most favored policies chosen by subjects in the retrospective treatment differ from those in the non-retrospective treatment. Subjects in the retrospective treatment tend to choose the policies that fundamentally change the status quo, while those in the non-retrospective treatment show the opposite tendency. Overall, this result suggests that acquiring intergenerational retrospective viewpoints as part of projecting the future could possibly affect ways of thinking and preferences for possible betterment of the future.